Nobel Laureate to Dedicate School Garden

Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai, founder of Kenya’s Green Belt Movement, will preside over a ceremony for a new garden named in her honor at the Al Raby High School for Community and Environment, 3545 W. Fulton Blvd., at 6 p.m. Sat., Sept. 22.

The school itself, Al Raby High, is named for the Chicago civil rights leader and teacher who worked with Martin Luther King and later directed the Peace Corps in Ghana. The school teaches students to tackle social justice and environmental issues and uses community activism to inspire students personally and academically.

The native woodlands garden replaced 2,000 square feet of concrete at the school’s entrance and gave students hands-on experience in landscape design, creation and maintenance, said Nicole Gotthelf of the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT), the school’s founding civic partner.

The school group collaborated with GreenCorps workers and local businesses to create the garden, which was also supported by a grant from the Prince Charitable Trusts.

A community mapping technology called Geographic Information Systems, which helps study the impact of social and environmental issues, is used in the school’s curriculum. The same GIS technology is used by Maathai’s Green Belt Movement to map reforestation efforts.

Maathai is visiting Chicago as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival, and she will discuss her recent autobiography “Unbowed” at the University of Chicago on Sept. 23.

Maathai’s Green Belt Movement, which was founded in Kenya in 1977, has planted 30 million trees, created 6,000 nurseries and provided livelihoods to thousands of poor rural women in an effort to address deforestation and poverty.

Finding the roots of environmental degradation in government corruption and global development strategies that consume resources and promote inequality, the Green Belt Movement confronted Kenya’s dictatorship and Maathai was jailed repeatedly and severely beaten by police. She lived in hiding at times during the early 1990s.

But in Kenya’s first democratic election in 2002, she was overwhelmingly elected to parliament and became assistant minister for the environment.

The 2004 Nobel Prize recognized Maathai for “a holistic approach to sustainable development that embraces democracy, human rights, and women’s rights.”

This year, she is spearheading the Billion Tree Campaign of the United Nations Environmental Program, which is an effort to plant one billion trees in one year to help mitigate global warming.